Monkeys, happiness, and winning debates

Monkeys you say? Tell me more.
Jane Goodall once asked me, “Was it you, was it you who put a monkey in the loo?!” If you’re wondering, no it was not. Thankfully she was referring to a poster rather than an actual monkey. Yet, I take it as a point of pride to have been asked and to be working in a field where I regularly get close enough to monkeys to have been slapped by one (truthfully
it’s more than that but I’ve lost count). It was my fault; I was observing the monkeys and how dare that require looking at them. Primatology, the study of nonhuman primates (monkeys, chimpanzees, gorillas, etc.), is not for the faint of heart or slow of reflex. It’s a field I fell in love with (I mean look at the baby Sulawesi macaque on the right, it has a heart shaped bum!) during my Masters dissertation studying Japanese macaques (see: photo above of suckling infant).
There are a lot of different things about primates that I could study (having anecdotally and painfully observed their speed) and the area of primatology that I am most interested is primate welfare. What do I mean when I say “welfare”? Well, I use a very broad definition and define welfare as the mental and physical health of an animal. In order to study animal welfare, researchers, such as myself, use methods that cross between the fields of animal behaviour, psychology, and physiology, among others. We observe animals for unusual behaviours, assess them for increased stress levels, and look for signs of injury and illness. Animal welfare science is a growing field and, with pioneers such as Marian Dawkins (Dawkins, 1980) and Temple Grandin, it is one with multiple strong and well known female scientists to look up to.

Enough of that, let’s talk about me.

My research focuses on the individual animal, which is why I’m currently in a psychology department studying individual differences in animal personality. I take the approach that an animal’s welfare is an individual experience and we need to understand the individual differences associated with it, specifically personality. Most of us have a general idea of what personality is, especially when asked to list the traits we love or hate about other people. Over the last couple decades it has become more accepted to talk about animals having personality as well (Gosling, 2001). It’s rare that someone describes their dog as “consistently approaching unfamiliar people and animals in a nonaggressive manner”. Instead, they say their dog is friendly and sociable. In the case of my dog Juneau (left), we describe her as eccentric and too clever for her own good. While some scientists may be on the fence about animal personality my experience has been that the public isn’t, they get it and they believe that animals have it. In order to understand primate welfare I look for the personality differences that influence it, which is the focus of my research. I want to know if certain personality traits make animals more likely to be do well in captivity, in the same way that people with certain personality traits do better in life. For example, more extraverted and sociable people tend to be healthier and happier (Costa & McCrae, 1980; Deary, Weiss, & Batty, 2010).

I started as PhD student at the University of Edinburgh in 2013 working with Dr Alex Weiss. Alex and I have different scientific backgrounds and naturally, we disagree on some things. Key among the disagreements we’ve had over the years is the difference between welfare and happiness in animals. Alex felt that if an animal had everything it needed in captivity (safety, food, companionship, good physical health) then it had high welfare. He noted then even when animals have all these things they can be unhappy, which to him meant that happiness and welfare did not necessarily go together for animals. Alex based this on the observation that some people appear to have everything they could want for (money, friends, shelter) but aren’t happy. I felt differently. As I said earlier, I take the approach that an animal’s welfare is an individual experience. Therefore, if the animal appears to have everything it needs but is still unhappy then, by definition, that animal has reduced welfare. How to find out who is right though? To the Batcave! Yeah, sadly not. Instead it was off to Google Scholar to research and come up with a way of testing my hypothesis that primate happiness and welfare were one and the same.

What I found was a great article by Franklin McMillan (2005), who says that there are five main things that influence an animal’s welfare: mental stimulation, physical health, stress, social relationships, and control of physical and social environment. When psychologists look at human happiness they typically use questionnaires (Sandvik, Diener, & Seidlitz, 1993) and there is a questionnaire to measure primate happiness (King & Landau, 2003) but animal welfare scientists don’t typically use questionnaires as there are concerns about the accuracy of ratings.
This hasn’t been well studied though so I took McMillan’s five things and created a questionnaire for staff familiar with animals to fill out. To test if it worked I took my welfare questionnaire and the primate happiness questionnaire and sent them out to zoos and research facilities.

Well, you win the debate or not?

Currently, I’m working on finishing my PhD (send whisky for my woes) and have used the questionnaires to study welfare and happiness in three species: Brown capuchins, chimpanzees, and rhesus macaques. First thing I found was that staff familiar with the animals I studied were really good at rating animal welfare. They agreed to the same degree that people do when they rate their friends and family member’s personality. The next thing I found, much to my own happiness, was that welfare and happiness are really one and the same in those three species (I won!). Three species and some pretty compelling results (Robinson et al., 2016; in review; in prep) were convincing enough to get my supervisor to rethink his opinion on happiness and welfare. Did you catch that? The PhD student actually won one! Sure, Alex has taught me a billion things to this one thing I taught him, but I will take it.

So, what about personality and welfare? Personality does influence primate welfare, similar to what we see in people. Animals with certain personality traits have higher happiness and welfare. The brown capuchins that were more sociable, assertive, attentive, and more emotionally stable were those that had higher happiness and welfare. For chimpanzees, seems to be about extraversion and emotional stability. Rhesus macaques, it’s all about confidence; those with more confident personalities had higher welfare and happiness. It’s my hope that now we know more about welfare, happiness, and personality we can use this information to improve the lives of animals. This could be done by using the questionnaire as another tool for measuring animal welfare or by trying to provide more care for animals with personality traits that tend to be related to unhappiness.

Upon reflection…

While my research results are better than I could have hoped for the best part of this research were the experiences I gained along the way. As I get to the end of my PhD, and this post, I’m starting to put thesis together and I’m all about reflection about my past three years (when I’m not panicking about the next three). I’ve gotten to study three species of primates, worked in zoos and research facilities (many of you will have thoughts on animals in research, I get that but don’t have room to get into that topic without a separate post), and collaborated with tons of amazing researchers. All of that is fantastic but let’s be honest, the monkeys are the best part.

You may be wondering what monkeys are like. I’ve worked directly with over 100 macaques and there is no doubt in my mind that each one is an individual with very different personality. Some are funny, some are playful, some are grumpy, and plenty are aggressive (learned that the hard way). While I hope that I’ve piqued your interest in primates, their amazing personalities, and their welfare I would be remiss if I didn’t state that primate are not pets (see resources below). I know I’ve spoken of my passion for working with primates but only in professional manner and environment and I never treat them as less than they are, which is wild animals. Primates are far too clever and socially complex to be kept as pets. Anyone that tells you otherwise is flat out wrong. No exceptions to the rule, no anecdotes, no to primates as pets.

Having said my warning, I will finish by acknowledging that while there are a lot of words to describe what I do (science, animal welfare, primatology) the one that always stands out to me is ‘privileged’. Working with primates is a privilege. Studying and working to improve their welfare is the best way I know to show my appreciation of that privilege.

If you’re interested in learning more about primate welfare, there are some public engagement resources that I’m a big fan of: